Tag Archives: los

SEPTEMBER 21, 2018 DAVID FOSTER WALLACE referred to a novel-in-progress as a “kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around.” A partially existent work of fiction trails you everywhere, utterly defective, a ludicrous “betrayal of all your hopes for it,” he said. Andrew Martin’s first book is about …

SEPTEMBER 20, 2018 I RECENTLY CAUGHT the start of a revolution that swept Armenia’s autocrat from power and replaced him with an opposition newspaper founder. It started as a mass demonstration and, had it been crushed, it might have hardly been remembered. More striking was that it was completely nonviolent. …

SEPTEMBER 20, 2018 AT THIS POINT, it might seem obvious that the various uprisings of 1968 were a global affair. Recent anniversary issues of Jacobin and The Nation, for example, have emphasized the interconnection of events in the United States, Vietnam, France, and Mexico. Yet even today, many accounts of …

SEPTEMBER 19, 2018 A color has many faces. — Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963) ¤ AT ITS BASE, writing is an act of drawing, of applying short, black intersecting lines to a white page. When illegible to a reader, the graphic page fails to represent a world through words …

SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 BODIES OF SUMMER, Martín Felipe Castagnet’s absorbing debut novel, recounts a few months in the life of Ramiro, a man living several centuries in the future. At the beginning of the narrative, Ramiro has just reemerged from a hundred years in “flotation,” a state of suspension in …

This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 19, Romance To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase a copy at your local bookstore. ¤ so, Ecstasy And after LOVE had wept and eatenThe burning heart, my burningHeart, and LOVE our Lord, Lord, …

SEPTEMBER 11, 2018 TEXAS FAMOUSLY WIELDS an outsized influence on the content of the nation’s textbooks. And since the Texas State Board of Education is typically populated by appointees who think global warming is a hoax, evolution is a liberal plot, and slaves were happy, this arrangement tends to have …

SEPTEMBER 10, 2018 THE 19TH CENTURY, violent and progressive and anxious and confident all at once, seems to be getting closer to us the further it recedes into the past. Many of the defining characteristics of the age, roughly bracketed in Europe and the United States by the French Revolution …

SEPTEMBER 8, 2018 THE ANCIENT GREEK historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (circa 480–424 BCE) asserted that he wanted to preserve humanity’s “mighty and marvelous deeds” so that they would not “be forgotten in time.” Writing in a rich, dramatic style, he presented vivid scenes of history that echoed the emotional responses of …

SEPTEMBER 7, 2018 NEXT TO HAVING your doctor ask you to say “aah,” having your blood examined is one of the most common diagnostic rituals. Some specific blood tests, such as that for diabetes, need just a drop from a finger stick, but broader evaluations can require a teaspoon or …